As discussed in “Spatial Object Tracking System Based on Linear Optical Sensor Arrays” by Anil Kumar and Pinhas Ben-Tzvi in IEEE Sensors Journal, indoor motion tracking is an extremely critical component in various engineering problems [1]. Researchers from around the world in both academia and industry have been investigating various sensing modalities to develop reliable and accurate indoor motion tracking systems. The list of applications involving motion tracking is endless, however accuracy and the high cost of such systems has limited the use of motion tracking in everyday applications. Existing accurate motion tracking systems are limited solely to research-based applications due their very high cost. To facilitate versatility of motion, non-contact tracking systems are preferred over contact-based systems for most applications.
Optical motion tracking systems are the most common class of non-motion tracking systems. Numerous systems for measuring object surface or point location by optical triangulation exist in the literature. Existing motion tracking systems often use multiple video cameras to estimate the position and orientation of the target. This makes them expensive, dependent on a bulky setup and computationally intensive. Such limitations make the existing systems less mobile and versatile in terms of usage. Many existing inertial tracking systems utilize magnetic measurements for attitude estimation, which can be easily corrupted by stray electromagnetic fields.